I was reading Scoble’s post about his 7th year of blogging and some of the issues he’s had locating his old post that have gotten lost for several reasons. I know that I had some blog posts that I didn’t have in my WordPress database that I’ve lost, but then Scoble’s post reminded me of the Internet Archive.
After a bit of searching, I’ve now got several posts up from 2000 and 2002. In 2001, I wasn’t really running anything that can be called a blog, it was more of a collection of random links.
Anyhow, my first blog post on my site now takes us back to May 14, 2000. I really wish that I had taken screenshots of prior designs as well – the Internet Archive doesn’t typically capture graphics and such, so some of the older shots look pretty bad.
Oh well. The exercise was interesting. I knew that along the way I’ve run (in reverse chronological order) WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal and my static HTML page with dates and entries manually posted. However, I totally forgot that in 2000 I ran Slashcode.
Anyhow, back to the title of the post. Scoble points out that the term ‘weblog’ was coined by Jorn Barger 10 years ago on December 17, 1997. Happy 10th, blogs!
I love some of Jorn’s original principles for blogging:
2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.
3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.
I think for #2 that times have changed a bit, and I agree with #3. Matter of fact, I’m sure someone’s already posted that #2 is wrong.